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Monday, February 7, 2011

Ground Temperature Upcurve

6 Feb '11: Ground Temperature: I run the GSHP ground pump for the usual 20 mins, hopefully mixing the glycol up a bit as it goes round, and ensuring that it's a reasonable representation of the deep ground temperature. At today's date all three of my indicators (the Sunbox thermostat, the In and the Out temperatures of the GSHP) average at 11.4º. Last year it was 6.8º, but we were having a cold Spring.
One of the major motivations for this is to prevent the deep ground from chilling. We are defrosting it in winter and charging it with additional heat in summer.
During the winter of 2009-2010 I suspect that my measuring may not have been as rigorous as it is now, because of the more frequent oscillations, but the trend is quite visible. The sharp deeper troughs are probably when I didn't give enough time for the ground to recover after turning the GSHP off.
Since the sunboxes were installed in mid March '10, the ground temperature recovered quickly to a higher point at the end of July '10, and has been pretty stable ever since. With the weather improving in Jan and Feb'11, the temperature has actually recovered slightly. I would dearly like to see the summer peak rise higher than in July '10.
When there is demand from the GSHP for heat from the Sunboxes, there is an average delivery of about 1.80 kW from them, so there is still regular heat coming in, even if the Sun is not shining daily.Navitron

1 comment:

Wondered if you could drop me an email with your contact details to info@leeds-solar.co.uk

I'd been following your progress via navitron, and wondered if we could maybe discuss some probono collaboration with our consultancy arm to help validate your results, add in some more metering etc if it would help.

Annualised geo-storage of solar heat has been something I've been looking into for several years, so I'm very interested in your project, and from what I can see your data appears to be validating the concept.

15 June 2014: It has been a dry June so far with negligible rain. I'm glad to have 300litres of water storage for the garden. House ...

Peveril Solar House

Welcome to Charging the Earth!

PEVERIL SOLAR is the first house in the UK to be entirely solar heated all year round! It is Carbon Net-Zero. It is an 'Active House' balancing inputs and outputs. PV generation and heating system consumption are in favourable balance using concepts of energy storage. Others claiming houses to be the first date from 2013 (and are unbuilt); this house exists and was carbon zero since 2011.

The name 'Charging' refers to 'storing energy underground': we have custom-built solar collectors, Surya Sunboxes, with ETFE front surfaces, to pump solar heat deep down into the earth. The building's heat pump gets all of this back in Realtime (immediately), Diurnially (later during the evenings) or Interseasonally (in Winter, months after the Summer).

Thus, we are augmenting the heatpump by storing long term heat in the summer, and we are defrosting the ground in winter-spring conditions, supplying solar energy directly to the heat pump, through its ground loop.

The five-way pentangle of Grid, Borehole, Heat pump, PV roof and Sunboxes have made the house Carbon Zero (for metered consumption). It's working, and we will continue to record data, to maintain that efficiency, and write it up in this website through to next year and beyond.

During theAutumn of 2012, we built a small house extension that is ultra insulated, with a higher energy gain than it loses.

Note, that we still have a net import of power from the Grid, because we still need power for lighting, cooking and appliances. But for the building emissions (as opposed to lifestyle emissions), we have achieved a credit balance of the regulated quantities, as recorded by meters.

The web-log follows the project from this general idea in Aug. 2009 to a technology of Surya Sunboxes, which seem to be effective - reducing energy costs of the house. Some of the Tabs will help you to get background and theory. You can click below to 'Follow Blog' to get email notifications - or email me. Please add Comments to the blog entries. If you find items in the Glossary that need explaining better, please ask. Thankyou!

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About the Author...

David Nicholson-Cole is a Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Nottingham, with 35 years experience of architectural teaching and practice, which has included special interests in construction, building information modelling, tall building design and renewable energy technologies.

Finally, thanks to my deceased aunt, Margaret Cringle (1915-2008) whose legacy paid for most of the cost of this project - as one who was always turning lights out to save electricity, she would be very pleased!